My Last Lament

by James William Brown

  She’d started going over to my father’s house regularly, saying that she needed to make some repairs. A shutter in the kitchen had come loose and was banging in the wind. Rain had poured down the chimney, bringing soot with it, making a mess on the hearth. On the roof, some tiles had been broken by a fallen branch. The house wasn’t her problem to deal with, but she told me, “Sometime, when all this is over and the Germans have gone home, this house will be your dowry. We must keep it worthy.”

  Dowry? I hadn’t thought of such a thing. It seemed that my second family would just go on as it was. I wasn’t able to think far ahead. The few young men in the village had gone off to the Albanian front to fight Mussolini when he invaded from the north. Some had been not much older than I and none had returned. And who needed a husband anyway? Not Chrysoula, it seemed.

  I went with her one day and inside the house she made a lot of noise, grabbing a broom and banging around in a big show of cleaning. Then she hammered on the broken shutter and even crawled out onto the roof to examine the cracked tiles. After a while, she sent me back to the fountain for a pail of water so she could scrub down the hearth and the kitchen floor.

  But when I got to the fountain, I saw the German officer in charge of our village, Colonel Esterhaus, at the front door of Chrysoula’s house. I froze because this was the man who would have been responsible for the order to execute my father and the other two men. I hadn’t seen him this close before. Thin, with fair hair and a rosy complexion, he’d brought along his translator, our old schoolmaster, Petros, who knew some German. Whenever they had something to say to us, the Germans brought him along like a puppy on a leash. It was said that his family was given favors of food for his service. He stood there in the doorway, nearly bald and squinting through spectacles with one cracked lens as he listened to Colonel Esterhaus trying to talk to Takis. Petros noticed me and waved me over.

  Crouching down, the colonel looked directly into Takis’s eyes as he spoke. Takis was always impressed with uniforms so he’d drawn himself up and was saluting the colonel. Petros told us that the colonel said he had a son of his own at home outside Hamburg just about Takis’s age. The colonel saluted Takis in return, then laughed and ruffled his hair.

  What the colonel had come to see us about was my father’s house, now my own, Petros said. On behalf of the Führer, the Reich was requisitioning it for military use. It was empty, so soldiers were to be housed there, effective immediately. I looked into the face of the colonel. I remember it as an ordinary sort of face, a bit flushed, a bit worried. It was not the face of a monster but just that of a busy man, carrying out duties, a man who missed his son. Yet from the mouth in that ordinary face had come an order for execution. And having killed my father, the colonel was now taking my father’s house.

  Suddenly it was as if I’d stuck my finger in a light socket and the jolt, working its way up and out, made me shake my head: no. Fear widened Petros’s eyes. But I couldn’t stop shaking my head. I tried to speak, but nothing came out, so with the toe of my shoe I scratched no in the dust. Petros stepped between the colonel and me, covering the word with his shoes and putting his hands on my shoulders.

  “Child, he’s not asking,” he said, voice wavering. “He’s telling.”

  The colonel, whose face had remained expressionless, said something more to Petros, who translated that the colonel intended to inspect the house shortly and if everything was suitable, the soldiers would move in later that day. Then he and the colonel left.

  I couldn’t move for what seemed a long time but probably wasn’t. Then I went as limp as a noodle and reached for Takis as support.

  “Do you know where Mother is?” he said. “I’m hungry.”

  I remembered Chrysoula was alone in the house. Fearing that the colonel might find her there before we could warn her, I grabbed Takis’s hand and stumbled along, ordering my legs to run, run. I was half dragging Takis, who cried out that I was hurting his arm. When we got to the house, we couldn’t find her at first. From below, we heard muffled voices. Opening the trapdoor in the floor of the kitchen, I started down the ladder with Takis behind me. I was startled to see Chrysoula with a middle-aged woman and a young man. They certainly hadn’t been there the last time I’d come. And they certainly weren’t from the village. Partisans? There was no time to wonder. I prodded Takis to tell his mother what had just happened. He missed the point, telling her that the colonel said he had a son “. . . just like me.” I was hopping up and down with impatience, shaking my head then shaking Takis and gesturing at the house above and around us until he said, “Oh, that . . .” and finally got it all out.

  Chrysoula clapped a hand over her mouth. There was silence as everyone took in the information. Removing her hand, she asked, “When will they come?”

  “Maybe now . . . ?” Takis said.

  I looked at the two strangers and realized that they were better dressed than village people, though their clothes were rumpled and dirty. A mother and her teenage son, I guessed. There was a resemblance, the same gray eyes and dark hair. He looked older than I was though not much. They couldn’t very well be partisans who lived in caves or ravines in the mountains. A pair of suitcases and some articles of clothing were lying about. So the two of them had been living there awhile. That didn’t seem possible in our occupied village where the Germans knew nearly everything that was going on. But there they were!

  Without a word, we flew around grabbing up their belongings and stuffing them back into the suitcases while Chrysoula all but shoved the pair of visitors out a window at ground level. She told them to run down the slope to the field below the village and hide in the gully there, the very one where my father had picked the squash. Just as soon as she’d done so, we heard from upstairs the tread of boots coming in the front door. To this day, I can’t imagine a sound more terrifying.

  The first one down the ladder was Colonel Esterhaus. He and another officer stood staring at us, then said something in German, probably asking why we were there. Chrysoula must have assumed the same thing because she said we were cleaning the house. To make them understand, she made circular motions with her hands as if polishing something and then pretended to sweep the floor with an invisible broom. I started to tremble with fear, all electricity gone. Did the Germans shoot girls? I had no doubt of it.

  They looked blank at first, then moved forward together and seized Chrysoula by each arm, forcing her up the steps toward the kitchen. She swore at them, telling them to go to the devil and leave a respectable woman alone but she also shouted at Takis, “Run, run get Petros—I don’t know what I’m accused of!”

  Takis and I climbed out the window after they’d gone and ran to the schoolmaster’s house. Petros was just about to settle into a nap. “What, they need me again? What sperm of the dog they are!”

  Chrysoula was with the Germans most of the day. The poor woman came home that evening, limping and carrying her shoes. Some of the village women gathered at the lion fountain as she leaned against her doorway.

  “Well, praise God,” she said. “I straightened them out!”

  One of the women said it looked as if it was Chrysoula who’d been straightened out. Her face was bruised and streaked from tears, her hair in tangles, her dress torn. The other women agreed and nodded together, clucking tongues in sympathy. I went to Chrysoula, took her hand and pressed it to my heart.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Aliki. They were sure I’d done something,” Chrysoula went on, “but they had no idea what it was, the fools.”

  She told how they’d slapped her repeatedly, questioning her about partisans. She insisted she was just a housewife, how was she to know about such things? Petros had vouched for her, saying he’d known her all his life. She was a good woman who’d taken in the orphaned child of the charcoal maker.

  “They didn’t care,” Chrysoula said. “They pulled my shoes off and beat my feet and legs with a sti
ck. But I made so much noise, putting a curse on them that their pricks should wither and fall off.”

  The women laughed and one, an old wisewoman, the mother of our present one, said she’d burn some herbs in front of the icon of St. Athanassios, he who’d spent so much of life suffering in exile, to make the curse come to pass.

  Finally, Colonel Esterhaus had seemed to grow tired of the noise Chrysoula was making and told her that this was just a warning and that they’d be watching her.

  “What’s there to watch?” Chrysoula asked the women. They looked at one another but said nothing.

  The next day, the mother and son moved into the basement of Chrysoula’s house, which was in the same place in her house as in my father’s, down a trapdoor ladder. But unlike my father’s house, Chrysoula’s was placed in such a way that from the outside it appeared to have just the single above-ground story. Chrysoula had put a thin rug over the trapdoor to conceal it in the kitchen. She pulled the rug back to open the door. But she’d attached a piece of twine to the outer edge of the rug, and she tugged the twine after her when she was the last person to go down the ladder. So the rug was pulled back into place as the trapdoor closed.

  When I drew a question mark in the air and pointed downstairs, Chrysoula told me only that they were city people. Refugees, she said. I didn’t know what that meant so I drew another question mark.

  “People who have to leave their homes and need to hide for a while,” she said quickly as she turned away from me before she could see me ask again. “Don’t be so curious. Now go play with Takis. I’d like you to make sure he keeps his mouth shut tight. No one must know. No one. Outside the house, these people don’t exist. If only Takis were as silent as you.”

  But what did it mean to be a refugee? I wondered. I didn’t want to think what was likely to happen if the Germans found out about them. Why did refugees have to come here anyway? And why was Chrysoula taking them in? There had to be something unusual about our visitors, some secret, and, after thinking about it, I guessed that they must be spies. I’d heard about spies on the shortwave radio and was excited to think that we were living in the same house with two of them. And they had to be important ones, didn’t they, or why else would Chrysoula have taken such a risk?

  I wouldn’t let her alone about it. Following her around, I drew question marks on a dusty windowpane, on a bar of soap, in a plate of boiled greens.

  “What do you want me to say, Aliki? Stop asking.” But when I’d made a big enough nuisance of myself, she said simply, “Sometimes you have to do something not to feel helpless. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  Once Takis realized there was someone downstairs, there was no stopping him from pushing the rug aside and scooting down to see our visitors. I heard him warning them, “Be careful of the ghost down here. His name is Dimos and he has orange hair and eats dirt.”

  I joined him. “She doesn’t talk,” Takis told them about me. “But she’s my friend.”

  “We saw you at the other house,” the woman said. Though they’d spent the night in the gully, they still looked more like people out of the magazines we’d seen now and then before the war. “I’m Sophia,” the woman said, “and this is my son, Stelios.” He glanced at me from under thickly fringed eyelashes, then looked quickly away. “He’s shy,” she added.

  A shy spy? But I knew nothing about city people and I don’t think anyone in the village had ever been to Athens except my mother and Takis’s father, who’d never returned. It seemed nearly as distant and foreign as the Land of Big Radios, where everyone wanted to go because Chrysoula’s cousin had become rich enough to send the shiny Zenith to Chrysoula. In magazine photographs, city people always looked in a hurry, moving across streets in a mob while traffic waited. Or flowing like rivers in and out of sports stadiums. What did they know about villages like ours where people made charcoal or harvested flax in the fields? There was no bank here, no pharmacy or doctor. The only law enforcement was that of a field policeman, who made sure no boundary stones were moved between fields unless he’d been paid not to notice. It was many miles to the nearest hospital or regional court of law on unpaved roads that were often deep in mud all winter.

  But right there, in Chrysoula’s house, were two people from the outside world. Spies, refugees, how could you tell? And how had they managed to find us? And did they play cards?—that was Takis’s main interest. Stelios did. At first Takis seemed wary of the gangly young man with the bashful smile. But Takis covered it by trying to boss him around.

  “Sit there,” he told him, pointing to a grubby corner of the basement. “They’re my cards so I get to shuffle and deal.”

  Stelios just smiled and sat down cross-legged on the floor.

  I thought Sophia was lovely even though she looked tired and uncomfortable in the dirty basement. She had a quick smile and kept thanking me for letting her and her son stay in our house. I tried to act out the fact that this was Chrysoula’s house, not mine. But I only seemed to confuse her. For the first time since my father had died, I wanted to talk. But all I could do was open and close my mouth like a fish. When words began to form in my throat, a great sadness came over me and I wanted to weep.

  With two more people to feed, Chrysoula needed help. Wandering the mountainside behind the village, she and I pulled up wild greens, mostly dandelions, which we’d boil and eat with vinegar. Other women were there too, including my little friend Zephyra—the one who’s now so ill—and her mother, all slowly searching the rocky ground for anything that might be edible. I waved to Zephyra, who pretended not to see me.

  “Ah, so little today,” her mother said, glancing over to see how Chrysoula and I were doing.

  Chrysoula was showing me how to use a spoon to dig up the bulbs of wild hyacinths. “We can pickle them. Along with wild onions and garlic. Look, more over there.”

  “Where?” the other women asked, rushing to where Chrysoula had pointed. They shoved one another to get the best spot for digging.

  Chrysoula laughed, saying, “Look, Aliki, the old cats are all chasing the same mouse.”

  Zephyra’s mother hissed back at her, “Take care of your own mice that they don’t get us all caught!”

  Chrysoula took my hand and we walked away from the others. Zephyra’s mother was certainly referring to our visitors downstairs. Already news of their existence must have spread somehow, but how many villagers knew? If Zephyra’s gossipy mother had worked it out, then the others probably also knew. To shelter anyone endangered everyone. I glanced at Chrysoula to see if she felt the fear as I did, but her face showed no emotion.

  “I know a ravine where we might find some striped snails,” she told me, marching along. “We can make salingaria vrasta with lots of thyme. Very tasty. I’ll collect the snails; you pick the thyme.”

  That night, she put the snails in an earthenware jug with the thyme so they would feed all night and have the flavor of the herb when cooked. From the room where Takis and I slept next door, I could hear them. They’d crawl partway up the jug, trying to get out, lose traction and fall back down. Their shells would make a little click when they hit the bottom of the jug. Just as I’d be about to fall asleep, there’d be another click. And then another. They couldn’t escape and they couldn’t stop trying. My mind clouded over then as Takis’s and my breathing slowed and we slipped together into the dark shell of sleep.

  Sophia and Stelios had never eaten country food like boiled snails or pickled bulbs. So the next evening in the basement lit by candles, Chrysoula tried to demonstrate. “You hold it like this,” she said, positioning the opening of a snail in front of her lips. “And then you suck and suck until the tasty creature just pops into your mouth.” She made loud slurping noises and chewed vigorously. “Like that. And then you have one of these little vinegary bulbs, so nice and crunchy.”

  Sophia looked dubious but Stelios dipped into the pot and f
ollowed Chrysoula’s instructions. “They’re good,” he said. “Thank you for your kindness.”

  He was always polite and at first spoke in a more formal way than we were used to. Or maybe it was that he got rather tongue-tied, as when the day before he’d asked me if I liked to read. “Books, I mean, or, well, you know, well, I guess you don’t have a library here, I mean, well, do you? Read, I mean?”

  I didn’t. I knew how to read and write a little, but when the village became occupied Petros had closed the school and locked up the textbooks. Who would want to read those old things anyway? There weren’t any other books in the village that I knew of and most villagers couldn’t read at all.

  Sophia was having trouble with the snails and bulbs. Although she maintained a pleasant enough expression as she put the shell to her lips, I guessed that sucking a snail out of its shell was not something she’d ever expected to do.

  Takis was little help, saying, “No, no, you have to suck really hard, like this.” He slurped at length. Sophia clapped a hand over her mouth and hurried upstairs.

  “Stop that, Takis,” Chrysoula said.

  “What did I do?”

  Stelios explained that his mother had stomach problems. “It’s been worse since my father and uncle . . .”

  Chrysoula shook her head for him to stop, but he didn’t seem to see her in the dim light.

  “. . . were taken away.”

  “Who took them?” Takis asked.

  “Let him eat his dinner,” Chrysoula said. “And you tend to yours.”

  No one said anything for a minute or so until Takis blurted out, “But where’d they go?”

  Stelios spoke haltingly at first, but his shyness seemed to drop away as he went on. Chrysoula looked alarmed, but she didn’t stop him again. What he was saying didn’t make much sense to me then—how there’d been a lot of family discussion about whether his father and uncle should go to the central synagogue in Athens to register because the German-appointed mayor had demanded it. I didn’t know what a synagogue was then. And register for what?